Altis preps wafer shuttle for embedded CBRAM

LONDON Ė Altis Semiconductor SA (Corbeil-Essonnes, France), the specialty foundry bought by French entrepreneur Yazid Sabeg from IBM and Infineon Technologies in 2010, is preparing to run a multi-project wafer in August for customers interested in using conductive bridging RAM (CBRAM) as an embedded nonvolatile memory technology.

It is expected that the memory technology will be used to add relatively small memories for such applications as calibration, identification, security and trimming of circuits.

Altis, formerly a joint-venture between IBM and Infineon, runs a 200-mm wafer fab with 180-nm and 130-nm CMOS processes with low-k and copper interconnect capabilities.

Altis has also been a partner and foundry for Adesto Technologies Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), the original developer of CBRAM. Adesto offers a family of non-volatile memories based on CBRAM varying in memory capacity from 32-kbits up to 1-Mbit offered as functional and electrically compatible with serial EEPROMS and with SPI and I2C interfaces. The devices are manufactured for Adesto by Altis using its 130-nm C11 CMOS process originally licensed from Infineon.

Adesto's technology is based on programmable metallization cell (PMC) technology licensed from Axon Technologies Corp., a spin-off of Arizona State University. CBRAM has been shown to scale both physically with Moore's Law to below 20-nm as well as operating at less than one volt, Adesto has said in the past. CBRAM cells can be programmed in less than 100-ns and CBRAM consumes 100 times lower current than flash memory, the company has claimed.

"CBRAM is technology agnostic, easy to add to any process, and highly scalable with a clear advantage over embedded flash technology," said Karl Lange, vice president of sales and marketing for Altis.

Altis led third round of funding in Adesto that was announced in October 2011 and at that time concluded a licensing agreement that enables Altis to offer embedded CBRAM memory IP for its customers.

"Our third round funding is a strong vote of confidence in Adesto's ability to begin selling our first CBRAM devices and to make our IP available to customers through our Altis partnership," said Narbeh Derhacobian, CEO of Adesto, at time.

Adesto claims to have 'product', but no data sheets, or even part codes ?
Hard to see customers making a design-in decision, on that platform.
Supply operating range looks relatively narrow, and no mention on write-cycle endurance, or byte/page write speeds, or SPI speeds, or Quad or DDR SPI support....

Kinnar--Others are interested in CBRAM, if you go back to EETimes
http://www.eetimes.com/design/memory-design/4214734/Phase-change-memory--PCM--progress-report--part-2?pageNumber=3
You will find that Micron have CBRAM on their list of a number of potential NV memory technologies under evaluation. Listing the various areas of risk, they attribute the highest risk to manufacturing.
The other problem that will require careful consideration, especially with respect to scaling is the matrix isolation device which must be bi-directional.
The sold state "plating" process itself should work just as well at dimensions of sub 100nm as above.

Seems a very good achievement in memory technology, from the article it proves to be the best in all the aspects, package density, access-time and power consumption. But as most of the other manufactures are not after it, it means there will be some kind of hurdles in the manufacturing of CBRAM.

It's good to see that CBRAM technology consumes power that is 100 times lower than that of a FLASH memory...what about the cost? Cheaper than FLASH as well? Could not find the data sheet of the CBRAM memory devices on the Adesto's website.